, '.Q d " o ,... ,\) 'f ' . to settle, whispering at the tilted palm of the boy-god, Augustus. My own face holds negro N eros, chalk Caligulas, as their reflection slides along the glass of faces foaming past triumphal cars. Master, each idea has become suspicious of its shadow. A lifelong friend whispers in his own house as if it might arrest him; markets no more applaud, as was their custom, our camouflaged, booted militias roaring past on camions, the sugar-apples of grenades growing on their helts; ideas with guns divide the islands; in dark squares poems will gather like conspirators. Then Ovid said, "When 1 was first exiled, I missed my language as your tongue needs salt, my absence turned my country to a child, no bench would tell my shadow (Here's your place;' bridges, canals, willow-fanned waterways, everything normal felt like an insult, till, on a tablet smooth as the pool's skin, I wrote reflections that, in many ways, were even stronger than their origin. "Tiled villas anchored in the breaking orchards, parched terraces hid in a dust cloud of words; among clod-fires, wolfskins, starving herds, Tibullus's flute faded, sweetest of shepherds; throug h shaggy pines the beaks of needling birds pricked me at T omis to stitch their tribal tongue so, since desire is stronger than its disease, my pen's beak parted till we chirped one song in the unequal shade of equal trees. "I let the seasons wrestle with their clouds while I learnt government in that hermitage of a stone table swept by the shadowy spines 31 p . of branches skittering from Caesar's rage with every yaw. There, hammering out lines in that green forge to fit me for the horse, against the far, seductive surf of crowds, I ruled a solitude so tyrannous that no wife softens it, or Caesar envies." .LJ\cross the swimming poo]'s dazzling pane he put on his sunglasses. By this time the light waves of his voice were darkening. "Romans"-he smiled-"will mock your slavish rhyme, the slave will mock your Roman structure; well, from Metamorphoses to Tristia our art tries to make order, that is all." Tightening his toga gently, he went in. III .LJ\t dusk, the sky is loaded like watercolor paper in an orange wash in which every edge frays- painting with no memory of the painter- and what this pool recites is not a phrase from an invisible, exiled laureate, where there's no laurel, but the scant applause of one dry, scraping palm tree as blue eve- ning ignites its blossoms from one mango flower, and something, not a leaf, shakes like a leaf, as swifts with needle-beaks dart, panickIng over the pool's cloud-draining light. For an envoi, write what the wrinkled god rep ats to the boy- god: "May the last light of heaven pity us for the hardening lie in the face that we did not tell." Dusk. The trees blacken like the pool's umbrellas. Dusk. Suspension of every image and its voice. The mangoes hang from their green dark like meteors. The fruit bat swings on its branch, a tongueless bell. -DEREK W A LC01:"r